The combination of using a touch typing tutor and filing the letters off my keyboard must be doing something… According to Stamina I’m now regularly hitting over 200cpm (which is about 40wpm, but 200 sounds much better than 40…)

Other benefits include being able to type in the dark with the lights off, and with my eyes closed. Don’t ask me what use that is, I just can, OK? Quite impressive for just a grand total of 5 hours spent in the tutor I thought…

So you’ll be happy to hear that it means that I’ll be able to churn out this stuff even faster than ever. Yippee!

I gave up in the end and knuckled down to some serious tinkering.  Found a spare hard disk and loaded up Ubuntu 6.10 linux onto it to see if I could get my music program functioning again.

After updating the whole system over the internet, a mere 1Gb (!) download and a few hours of tinkering later and it lives again!  Hoorah!  I’m so happy, I’ve got one of the few useful things I’ve ever written up and running again.

Of course nothing is ever that simple round here, that was purely a test… Now I have the fun task of repeating the installation on a headless box with no optical drive attached.  Think I’ll wait until I acquire a more up to date disc with Ubuntu on, don’t fancy that monster download again.

Other than that, I was quite impressed with Ubuntu, still not a fan of the Gnome desktop, I’ve always prefered KDE, but the system itself is a breeze to use.  I could be converted.

As I mentioned a few days ago I aggregated all my digital photos into one place recently. One part of the task involved connecting a bunch of hard drives one at a time and scanning them for the files I wanted. While this wasn’t a problem for the old Windows disks I had lying around, I was stumped for an answer to the Linux disks for a while.

A long time ago I used a tool called Explore2fs that let me get at linux disks from windows, but that was then, and it was fairly primitive, so I went in search of something more up to date…

Which was when I discovered Ext2 IFS (catchy name) which is an altogether slicker bit of software. It works in the background giving you access to linux partitions through any bit of windows software. They just look like standard windows disks (C: D: E: etc…) Clever stuff, and just what I needed.

As you might be able to tell I’m quite taken with the Google suite of online apps. Gradually since starting to use Gmail I’ve noticed that I’m using my inbox more like a to-do list than just a repository for my incoming email. Combined with a couple of other free online apps you can turn it into a useful personal organiser.

In order to make this work though, you need to be disciplined in keeping your inbox empty… (I was put onto this way of thinking by way of two posts, the first from ZenHabits, and the second from Tim Ferris who writes a lot of sense…) Inboxes full of mail make me shudder, you know who you are…

In addition to acting on incoming mail promptly, I use the Google calendar to mail me about things I really need to do (as well as sending me texts to let me know and appointment is imminent).

The final weapon in the arsenal is Hasslebot. This is great for irregular reminders. If you want to be reminded to call someone every few weeks, but you don’t want it to appear too regimented you can get Hasslebot to mail you roughly every 14 days. And the key word there is roughly. Because of that you’ll seem spontaneous, just don’t let them know your secret…

The neat thing about getting these reminders thru your inbox is once you get into the mind set of having an empty inbox it provides a real incentive to act on the reminders you receive in order to have the warm fuzzy feeling you get from knowing where your towel is…

Give it a go for a week, see if it works for you and let me know how you get on.

I’ve just spent a pretty miserable few days trying to consolidate my digital photo collection. Over the past six years it’s been left to ramble over a laptop, four desktops, a handful of operating systems, half a dozen camera phones (not all mine) and at least eight hard disks that aren’t even attached to anything at the moment…

Seeing as I use the online version of Picasa, I thought I’d give the download version a try as I wanted to have everything local while I sorted the wheat from the chaff. So after nearly two days I now have a definitive, master archive of every digital image I’ve ever taken. Incredibly I, after six years I don’t appear to have lost anything (temporarily mislaid during the amalgamation, but not lost for good.)

I wouldn’t want to use Picasa everyday, the interface can be a bit non-intuitive at times, but all in all it’s not a bad tool. Now comes the next bit of the project, uploading them all to my Picasa WebAlbums site, because I’m getting nervous with only one copy of a lot of those files now. Only six more gigabytes to go…